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Our future, our universe, and other weighty topics

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Darwinism Fails to Explain Man's Higher Faculties

The main principle behind Darwinian evolution is the principle
that organisms tend to gradually evolve characteristics that give
them a greater survival value in their environment. This principle
allows us to explain many facets of humanity, particularly everything
underneath our necks. We have arms and hands because we are descended
from species that used to live in trees, and needed arms and hands to
swing from branch to branch. We have legs capable of running fast,
because we needed those to escape from predators. We have good vision
because we needed that to find food and spot predators. All of these
things can be explained through the principle of natural selection –
survival of the fittest. Most characteristics of a species that make
the individual members of a species more likely to survive (until
they reproduce) can be explained by referring to natural selection
and evolution.

However, there are some important aspects of human nature that
seem to be difficult or impossible to adequately explain by using an
explanation of evolution and natural selection. Humans have inner
selves and personalities. Humans are great at language, and at
formulating very abstract ideas. Humans are capable of wonder, joy,
love, guilt, compassion, imagination, and spirituality. Humans can
create art and literature, ponder their own deaths, wonder about the
meaning of life and the nature of the universe, create and follow
moral codes, and consider philosophical matters.

It is hard to explain any of this by evoking evolution or natural
selection, because most of it has no survival value, from an
evolutionary standpoint of making an organism more likely to survive
until it reproduces. 50,000 years ago a human who felt wonder by
looking at a sunset was not any more likely to survive than a human
who did not (in fact, the sunset-appreciating human was actually less
likely to survive, as he might let down his guard and be attacked by
a predator while he was enjoying the sunset). We can't explain the
origin of man's talents at art, philosophy, mathematics and
literature by imagining that such talents evolved because people who
had them were more likely to survive until reproduction.

Darwinism is bad at explaining these things.

Imagine you're a cave man 50,000 years ago. Life is pretty simple:
find food, don't freeze to death, and don't get eaten by a predator.
People at that time had no need for language, math, art, literature,
planning abilities, or inner thoughts. Grunts and hand signals would
have worked just fine to alert your fellow cave man when you see a
predator. So how did man get all of his higher faculties that have
allowed him to create art, novels, science, philosophy, and
government?

At the John Templeton Foundation website, there is a page in which
professors and experts attempt to answer the question, “Does evolution explain
human nature?” The short answers given by a panel of professors
and experts run the gamut:

Obviously, says the monkey.

Except where it matters.

Quite well.

Not entirely.

More fully by the day.

Not yet.

In part.

Yes.

Only up to a point.

Yes, but...

Totally, for a Martian.

Yes and no.

That's a spectrum of answers, but when we look at the answers in
detail, things don't go too well for those trying to answer the “Does
evolution explain human nature?” question affirmatively. The expert
giving the answer “Obviously, says the monkey” loses his
credibility by making the ridiculous claim that humans “have no
basic wants or needs that cannot also be observed in our close
relatives” such as chimpanzees. I guess this fellow has never heard
of the desire to obtain truth or the need to make a lasting
accomplishment or numerous other wants or needs that humans have and
chimps don't have. His “man is just a chimp” reasoning fails to persuade.

Another expert who answers “Yes” to “Does evolution explain
human nature?” then undermines his own answer by saying this: “Why
there is subjective experience at all - is actually a mystery. Only a
few Darwinian thinkers, such as Steven Pinker and the late John
Maynard Smith, have appreciated this problem.” So if that's true,
then it's not right to answer Yes to the question “Does evolution
explain human nature.” This is the “hard problem of
consciousness,” and there is a confession that “only a few
Darwinian thinkers have appreciated the problem,” which sure
doesn't sound like evolutionary theory has a real answer for it.

The typical evolutionary explanation involves random mutations and
random variance plus survival of the fittest. For example, imagine a
population of early humans. Because of random mutations and random
variance, some of the population would by chance have longer,
stronger legs. Then more of that population would survive because
those organisms could run faster to escape predators. That works fine
for explaining the evolution of certain physical characteristics of
the human body, and also some parts of the brain involving human
perception.

But the same type of explanation would seem to be impotent and
useless for explaining some higher faculties of mankind – simply
because we would not expect that any random mutations or random
variance would ever cause some early humans to have a slightly higher
amount of such faculties. It would not seem that random
variance or random mutations could cause a certain number of early
humans to be a little more capable of love, guilt, language,
mathematics, self-introspection, philosophy, inner lives,
spirituality, wonder, or advanced moral concepts. It almost seems to
require a kind of quantum jump to go from an animal mind to a mind
capable of such things. Can we really imagine that a random mutation
or a random variance would cause an organism to have a little bit of
an inner self when its parents had no inner self?

Evolution is a fact, and we know that man is very old and the universe is much, much older. But nevertheless we
have a problem in explaining how evolution could have produced all
of human faculties. Among the possible ways to explain this
discrepancy are as follows:

There might have been some extraterrestrial interference in
human evolution which led us to develop some of our advanced
faculties. Our evolution could have been altered by visitors from another planet.

Evolution might have been assisted by either a divine
influence, or by some unknown insentient force of nature that we do
not currently understand.

There may be some philosophical explanation for the origin or
existence of advanced human faculties, perhaps something along the
lines of a philosophy that grants consciousness more of a central
role rather than making it a mere by-product of unconscious natural
processes. It could be that mind comes before matter, rather than
the other way around.

I'm not sure what the answer is – perhaps one of these three, or
perhaps something else. I do think that evolution is overall a fine
theory that explains much. But champions of evolution may be hurting
their own cause when they try to make it look as if evolution can
explain the entire human mind. When advocates of a theory claim too
much for it, they may make it more likely that someone will reject
the theory altogether.

Rather then pretending we have most or all of the pieces of
nature's jigsaw puzzle, we should admit that we have only a few, and
that our knowledge of nature is only fragmentary.

Postscript: my theory of a programmed material universe (described here and here) may offer
an additional possibility for explaining the origin of Mind. I noticed recently a web post that describes a position similar to that taken in this post. It refers to the book Mind & Cosmos by Thomas Nagel:

Nagel is an eminent philosopher and professor at NYU. In Mind & Cosmos, he shows with terse, meticulous thoroughness why mainstream thought on the workings of the mind is intellectually bankrupt. He explains why Darwinian evolution is insufficient to explain the emergence of consciousness—the capacity to feel or experience the world.

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All posts on this blog are authored by Mark Mahin, and are protected by copyright. Copyright 2013-2014 by Mark Mahin. All rights reserved. Any resemblance between any fictional character and any real person is purely coincidental.